There’s a delightful conundrum in the messiness of this slim, whirlwind tale about cleanliness.
Narrator Charlie Sanderson assures listeners that the unnamed protagonist of Shannon’s electric debut doesn’t take herself too seriously. Sanderson’s comedic timing is sublime, lending a necessary self-deprecating air to the minxy anti-hero. This rudderless young woman is not easy to like but listeners will undoubtedly find themselves rooting for her, chaotic tendencies and all. The holder of many evidently useless degrees, the protagonist puts herself to work as a cleaner and drifts into a love triangle with her clients. Sanderson never falters in this sexy and scathing examination of post-graduate life, labor, gender, and the nearly orgasmic satisfaction of a nice, clean kitchen.
There’s a delightful conundrum in the messiness of this slim, whirlwind tale about cleanliness.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
Duration: 5 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781668157534
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
American colleges are favorable locales for ghastly event and hair-tearing circumstance. There is, for instance, a good deal of pleasure to be had out of professor and past-prodigy Grady Tripp's awful life, as portrayed by Michael Chabon in WONDER BOYS. There is a certain amount of slapstick here, but it's balanced by Chabon's superb portrait of a gale-force mid-life crisis, a soul-destroying albatross of an unfinished novel and the mind-numbing inconsequence of writers' conferences. David Colacci sounds a little starved for oxygen in his reading, but that's not exactly out of keeping with Grady Tripp's personal gestalt.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: N/A
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
Class lurks in varying degrees behind every great English comedy, its ineffable code being so endlessly conducive to ironic subtlety. QUEEN LUCIA, the first of the great Lucia novels of E.F. Benson, is imbued with it. Nonetheless, social striving rather than class per se gives the novel its real comic force. At its center is Lucia, the regnant, self-appointed social and cultural leader of a genteel, middle-class circle. She’s a schemer and poser of awesome theatricality and self-delusion. Although the narrative is conducted in the third person, the characters’ doings, most especially Lucia’s, are as often as not reported in the light in which the perpetrators hope to be viewed. Still, the true facts and motivations, usually base, shine luminously through. Geraldine McEwen’s reading truly enhances the work, being a model of cultivated discretion and ironic pacing.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: 9 hrs
Publisher: ISIS Audio Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
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